Advances in computer processing power and network communications have made information from a wide variety sources available to users on computer networks. Computer networking allows network computer users to share information, software applications and hardware devices and internetworking enables a set of physical networks to be connected into a single network Such as the Internet. The World Wide Web (Web), a hypermedia system used on the Internet, enables hypertext linking, whereby documents automatically reference or link other documents located on connected computer networks around the world. Thus, users connected to the Internet have almost instant access to information stored in relatively distant regions.
A page of information on the Web may include references to other Web pages and may include a broad range of multimedia data including textual. graphical, audio. and animation information. Currently, Internet users retrieve information from the Internet, through the Web, by `visiting` a web site on a computer that is connected to the Internet. The web site is, in general terms, a server application that displays information stored on a network server computer. The web site accepts connections from client programs, such as Internet browsers, and the client programs allow Internet users to access information displayed on the web site. As the number of physical networks connected to the Internet continue to grow, so too will the number of web sites that are accessible to Internet users.
Presently, the only practical way to search the Internet for web sites that are related to a specific topic is to use an Internet search program or engine, such as AltaVista.TM. or Yahoo.TM..
In order to use a search engine to search for web sites related to a specific topic, the Internet user submits a search query containing search terms to a software program on a network server computer. The software program executes the search program to retrieve web sites that are related to the specified topic and to store the retrieved web sites in a result set. Search programs typically search all accessible web sites and index and rank retrieved web sites. While search engines typically implement different search techniques for indexing and ranking retrieved web sites, a common technique is for the search engine to count the number of times a search term appears on a web site. Some search engines also consider how often the search term appears in the beginning of a document because documents with search terms in the beginning are more likely to be relevant to the search topic.
Based on the search topic and the number of retrieved web sites, the user may be required to scan through thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of records in the result set. Moreover, the user may be required to `click` hyperlinks in each record and wait for the web site associated with the hyperlink to display its contents. It is only after the web site's contents are displayed and examined by the user that the user can determine if the web site is relevant to the information sought. Often, this can be a slow process and users may have to go to a lot of immaterial web sites in order to find relevant web sites. Additionally, the user has no way of determining if another user has performed a search on the same topic and no way of sharing already conducted search and research quickly and easily with other Internet users via an Internet search engine.